Thick cloud has cleared, and the moon bathes the Zurich city in a soft light. I often stop to gaze at the moon in the middle of reading the novel 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami. Besides the fact that I am more perceptive to the world around me while I try to capture something written in words, it is the moon that characterizes the year 1Q84—not a world branched off from 1984 or running parallel to it, but like the train of time has switched the track, the year 1984 no longer exists. The year 1Q84 is the real world, a world with two moons hanging in the sky side by side. The book adopts the classic double narrative threads to tell the story of Aomame, a killer disguised as a masseuse, and Tengo, a novelist and a part-time cram school teacher. The two are seemingly unrelated, in fact inextricably linked, until they meet twenty years after their encounter and escape together from the world 1Q84.
The first time I read this book was ten years ago when I was in high school. On those boring hot summer afternoons, with the hum of cicadas, I was drawn to the extraordinary love story of Aomame and Tengo. ‘’If you can love someone with your whole heart—even if he’s a terrible person and even if he doesn’t love you back—life is not a hell, at least, though it might be kind of dark.’’ The sentences stoke the brittle heart of a teenage girl. But reading this book for the second time as an adult, I paid much more attention to the factors besides romance—-the Little People, religions, system and institutionalization, Air Chrysalis. What do they stand for and what do Murakami manifest through them? Many question marks arise in my mind. Below are some notes I took when I tried to find answers to them.
Page 209.
‘’If Big Brother were to appear before us now, we’d point to him and say, ‘Watch out! He’s Big Brother!’ There’s no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don’t you think?’’
George Orwell introduced Big Brother in his novel 1984 as an allegorical treatment of Stalinism. In contrast, the setup in 1Q84 is not a make-believe Utopia, very much close to reality, happening not in a vague distant future but unmistakably before our eyes. Disguised in different forms, however, we tend to overlook it and end up caught in our own trap.
Page 359.
This is a kind of mantra for him, thought Tengo. He has protected himself all these years by reciting such phrases. Tengo felt he had to smash this obstinate amulet of his, to pull the living human being out from behind the surrounding barrier.
Tengo’s father symbolizes institutionalization, a tiny screw in a humongous machine called government. He regarded his job at the NHK as the top honor of his life, sacrificed his family and freedom, and counted his personal value on some organization until the end of his life. He reminded me of the movie The Shawshank Redemption: ‘’These walls are kind of funny like that. First you hate them, and then you get used to them. Enough time passed, get so you depend on them. That’s institutionalized.’’ Murakami shows profound hatred and criticism towards such systems. He believes that once we are trapped by dogma, puzzled by a phony rosey world, we are on the edge of losing intellectual independence, and end up leaving ourselves to the judge of indifferent rigid rules.
Page 124.
It was Aomame’s firm belief that the human body was a temple, to be kept as strong and beautiful and clean as possible, whatever one might enshrine there. … Constipation was one of the things she hated most in the world, on par with despicable men who commit domestic violence and narrow-minded religious fundamentalists.
Constipation is one of the things I hate most as well.
Page 757
In his head, about to burst, he thought of his little house in Chuorinkan, and about his two young daughters. And the dog they owned. The dog was small and low to the ground and Ushikawa never could bring himself to like it. The dog never liked him, either. The dog wasn’t very bright, and barked incessantly. It chewed the rugs and peed on the new flooring in the hallway. It was a totally different creature from the clever mutt he had had as a child. Still, Ushikawa’s final conscious thoughts in this life were of the silly little dog scampering around the lawn in their backyard.
The portrait of Ushikawa before his death reminded me of the classic prologue in the epic book One Hundred Years of Solitude, “many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” I intend not to discuss here the unprecedented way of narrative that García Márquez created or how it affected generations of writers. Still, from a narrow-minded point of view, I am touched by how family ties warm people at the very end point in life.
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More to add when I have time